Composing a Further Life

not be contrasted so much as examined for common values and overlapping themes as we move into the new space opened up in our lives.
    I like to think of men and women as artists of their own lives, working with what comes to hand through accident or talent to compose and re-compose a pattern in time that expresses who they are and what they believe in—making meaning even as they are studying and working and raising children, creating and re-creating themselves. Just as the use of a new room in a house depends on what is already there in the lives and relationships and possessions of the owners, the use of a new stage in the life cycle is related to what came before, ideally related in a way that is more than a sum of parts but rather an inclusive composition of grace and truth. It is often only in its final pages that a story reveals its meaning, so the choices made in later decades may reflect light back on earlier years.
    If this is indeed a helpful way of looking at lives—if lives are composed somewhat like works of art, partly planned and partly improvised—then it is not enough to study what people do in retirement but essential also to study the relationship between what they do in retirement and what they did before—a relationship which, as in an artistic composition, may contrast or complete or reframe what came earlier, may be both profoundly surprising and surprisingly apt. Like the faces of wise and loving elders, lives so composed may be beautiful.

CHAPTER II
Small and Beautiful

    T HINKING ABOUT RETIREMENT involves thinking about work, why we do it, what its proper place is in life, and what that place could be.
    Some people love their work, thinking of it in terms of a vocation or calling, and cannot imagine life without it. I remember my mother saying to me, when I was a child, that if she had to she would
pay
to be able to work—and there are women pursuing careers today whose earnings are totally absorbed by child care and other replacements for their services. For many people, their work is the most basic component of their identity, defining who they are. For such people, retirement may lead to rapid decline.
    Some people hate their work, regarding it as something they are forced to do to support themselves and longing for the time when they can stop. Western attitudes toward work are haunted by the lines in the Book of Genesis in which God announces to Adam, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life: Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (3:17–19). This grim description of early agriculture in an arid climate continues to overshadow work of every kind to this day and may influence for the worse the way tasks and workplaces are designed.
    Most of us have a love-hate relationship with our work that is hard to evaluate and keep in focus. Even those with the strongest sense of vocation may sometimes be heard to say, “My job won’t let me do my work.” Thus speaks the doctor who is concerned about insurance forms, the priest who must worry about budgets and the state of the church roof, the teacher who finds endless hours wasted on paperwork and committees. It is not easy to shed the job and continue the work, but this is one common aspiration for retirement.
    At the bottom of the economic pyramid, men and women with little education often have very little choice in the work they do, working because they must at arduous and sometimes demeaning tasks, often at the lowest-paying unskilled jobs. It is ironic that the jobs that offer satisfaction and fulfillment also offer the highest pay. The labor movement has struggled to improve wages and working conditions but has not paid much attention to changes that might make work more satisfying—the emphasis is on shorter, rather than more meaningful, hours. This may be one reason for the movement’s decline.
    The use of skills seems to be a central component in the satisfaction people find in their work, especially the kind of skills that involve a measure of improvisation, addressing problems that call for specific and often creative solutions rather than repetition of standard solutions, even when these require high degrees of training. A carpenter modifying an existing building is always adjusting procedures to fit what is there, as a physician must